Here They Are: The Only 4 Countries American Voters Care About

Mitt Romney may have talked about the Middle East yesterday in what was billed (and panned)
as a major foreign policy address, but ad spending by both candidates'
camps shows that global affairs are still low on the list of key
campaign topics.

Fewer than 10% of ads aired in the U.S.
presidential race to date have made reference to international
issues--and those that do look abroad reveal a worldview that's largely
limited to Chinese trade, Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, according to a
tally by Elizabeth Wilner, a vice-president at the media research group
Kantar Media. Wilner argues that disparity is in fact even greater when
discounting China-trade-related ads, which she says are fundamentally
about U.S. economic policy. Without them, only 3.3% of spots have referred
to global issues.

Clearly, both campaigns' inward focus reflects
polls that consistently show American voters don't care much about the
rest of the world--particularly not beyond the country's military
engagements. But, it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, too: Even in
the wake of the global financial crisis and lingering euro zone woes,
most polls don't ask respondents specific questions about the global
economy. And without that data, campaigns and candidates have little
political reason to address it.

"People pay more attention to
global economic issues when they feel they can afford it, when things
are okay at home," Wilner says. "The economic situation around the world
could have some pretty devastating effects, just like war could, but
people don't see the connections."

In all, 309 different
presidential ads aired a combined 797,553 times between April 10 and
Oct. 4, making 1.1 million references to jobs, taxes and fiscal policy,
compared with just 75,292 to global affairs, Kantar's count
found. Of those global references, nearly half were
Republican-sponsored attacks related to Chinese trade practices and
nearly a third were Obama-backed references to the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Pro-Israel groups critical of the administration sponsored
most of the others.

The two remaining presidential debates
on Oct. 16 and Oct. 22 are due to focus more on foreign policy, though,
suggesting that interest--and ad spend--may soon get more global,
Columbia Journalism Review noted in a post highlighting Kantar's research.

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